Can I make a game in 48 hours?

This could be a mistake.
Almost on a dare I put together a bunch of friends and we are all in the 48hr Game Making Challenge. GameOn/QUT/iCi/Acid and the amazing Truna have put together an impressive event. There will be 17 student teams and 3 pro teams competing over this weekend. I’m in the Monkey Something pro team and all 6 of us have never made a game in under 9 months, Actually I average 2 years to make a game. So 48 hours is going to be a stretch.
There will also be 3 very brave teams from the (Griffith Film School) Games Design, where I lecture. Milk n’ Pickles, Sick Fish and Immigration Office will all be part of the first public appearance of the Griffith Games students.
To make things more interesting nearly everyone on the 3 separate pro teams have worked together. So this could be the weekend for long held grudges to surface.
You can read about it here http://www.48hrgamecomp.com/ Over the weekend it will be blogged and streamed live at that address. Or you can rock up to QUT Kelvin Grove and check it out. Any time of the weekend really. We’ll all be there.
Those who are about to game salute you.

Leave a Reply

I love it when a plan comes together.

This was day 1 for the Alternator Brisbane Dev team. The amazing thing is nothing exploded.

So myself and 3 other people are looking after the Brisbane side of the Alternator Game project for the ABC. The project is going to run for about 6 months. I’m going to endeavour to document the whole thing and drop out updates. I want to make the whole stressful and insane process a little more stressful and insane by being as open as possible.

And so the video above. This is our first clean, build, break, fix, network, install day. And the funk music makes it sound a lot more awesome. We’ve moved into K Tower in the Valley with Defiant Development. A brand new studio started by Morgan Jaffit.

More info to come, as we wind down from all the red cordial of yesterday.

Music by Kutiman “The Mother Of All Funk Cords”
You can buy his stuff here And you should because he’s awesome.

Been busy. But there’s always time for PONG.


For those on the iPhone, try here.

I finally had a weekend off so I put together this face tracking PONG demo using openCV. It’s just like the original PONG. But. With. Your. Face. There should be a nice HD version at Vimeo. I try to explain what’s happening in the video so watch it to hear what’s going on. Strangely enough keeping composed while trying to smack cubes with your face is a little tricky.

March was insane. I got back home and the next day was the first class of the year. And I haven’t stopped. Every project I was working on came to a grinding halt. Which was a little annoying. But there is great stuff coming down the line that I’m looking forward to getting out there. GFSGames has their first lot of 3rd years and they are awesome.

But next week is the mid term break so it’s scramble to get ahead time. No rest for the wicked or the convenor.

MattD

Nearly over. Nearly home.

a Pollock via iPhone and Pollock via Pollock

Tomorrow is Saturday and it’s really my last day of holiday. Sunday I’m getting a tour of the TOKYO GEIJUTSU DAIGAKU new media department from my old processing buddy Saito. I get the plane home on Monday, touchdown Tuesday and stand up in fronts of the first class of the year on Wednesday. I’m already damn tired and I’ve got a backlog of 40GB and growing of photos and video to get through. I’m leaving the photos for the plane.

Just one thing though. Visually this country is exhausting, Tokyo specifically. I’m good with iconography and body language so I’ve had no problems getting places or talking to people, just no existential topics. But I can’t read the language so I’m constantly searching for english in any signage. And the sheer number of fonts is driving me insane. How do people stand it here? After a day walking around I’m happy for any small part of familiar grounding. It did make me smile when I thought I saw comic sans at DisneyLand.

Did I mention it’s cold in Tokyo!

Guess what they sell ?

We’ve been here a day and it’s raining. Which is better than the snow that was falling when we first got here. If you follow the link above, I’ve started a flicker set with all the photos. Off to get some lunch and avoid the cold.

I’m going on Holiday !

050908_01_Tori_gates

From Saturday the 13th to March the 2nd I’m on holiday. I’m heading to Tokyo and camping in a hotel room for 2 weeks. Urban touristing. The sights I see will be the concrete and kitsch of the Tokyo MegaCity. I’ll be posting photos and a few posts no doubt. And I still have to finish my experimental gamplay entry for the month. So I’ll be doing stuff. But nothing serious. To kick that off there is another photo after the jump (click the post to see).

Dumping Screenshots from Unity

This might come in handy to a few people so I thought I’d post it here. This is just a dead simple script for taking a screen shot of a Unity Project. Add it to a gameObject and watch it drop out frames.

……•↓……•↓……•↓……•↓……•↓……•↓

Right click and save this file -> save_me_some_frames

The coolest thing I read last week

The timing pulses in question can be thought of as places in the transmitted wave trains where there is a particular phase reversal of the circularly polarized electromagnetic signals. At such places the electromagnetic field tensor passes through zero and therefore provides relatively moving observers with sequences of events that they can agree on, at least in principle.

from “Relativity in the Global Positioning System” by Neil Ashby

Really that paragraph has everything. Timing Pulses. Wave Trains. Phase Reversal. Tensor Fields Passing Through Zero. Seriously it’s amazingly cool. I can barely comprehend what it’s on about, and that’s just from the introduction. But it just emits a level of sci-fi geekery that you rarely find. Just one of the daily gems I get from twitter. Specifically from Nick Porcino (Meshula), go follow him.

I now have to go make something where a tensor field passes through zero.

Experimental gameplay entry

theFIELD

This is my entry in the Jan 2010 comp running over at experimentalgameplay.com. The theme was 100 things. You can play it at the link below.

theFIELD

◊ → Ο


The game is called theFIELD. And it’s quiet meditation on cube collection. Turn the lights down, breath, relax and push some cubes.
Controls are UP DOWN LEFT RIGHT and SPACE. Hopefully their use will be obvious.

So far it’s taken about 5 days to get it to this point. I got the gameplay nailed down in the first day and then it’s been tweak this, tweak that for 4. I even spent half a day on a possibly pretentious title screen (but there are 100 letters in the title). The music is by the wicked Joel (JiveMaster) Bird

I must give a big “dude your awesome” to Shawn Eustace, who when I asked for comments gave me a page of things I didn’t even see.

Comments and criticism are warmly encouraged.

I’m not sure how I feel about that.

visits from odd groups

On the day I was uploading a LOT of very old images to flickr I got a LOT of visits from a yahoo group called “ladies in costume”. They were very focused on a few images that I had of Jamie who wore the TY mascot back in 2002. Well that makes sense really, that is what their group is into.

The creepy part about it was back in 2002 when I was the spotter for that costume at E3, I had my first run in with a furry. There was a guy who kept coming around to the booth, not interested in the game but taking a lot of photos of the suit. I popped over, said hi and started the creepiest conversation ever.

He told me about his hobby (I was innocent at the time). He asked about the TY suit. The girl in the suit. How long she could stay in the suit. He boasted about how long he could stay in his suit, and then proceeded to show off a large number of photos of his suit. He even had a badge photo of it. And then his friends suits. And him in his suit. And him with his friends in their suits with him in his suit. And then I think I got rescued and had to walk away.

I don’t think this situation is like that situation. But some memories you just can’t repress enough.

It’s time for a change.

frame-0141

frame-0141 by matt ditton (AKA polymonkey)

2010 is going to be a big year. On Monday I start a new job. I’m going to be looking after this. I have no idea why there is a ninja on that page. But it sets an interesting tone.

To mark this special occasion I am gutting www.polymonkey.com. Over the next week it will be changed. I bought a new domain www.thequietvoid.com and the polymonkey_code blog will be moving over there. The polymonkey domain is going to shift to be the one thing I never got around to making. A portfolio site.

So with that I’m drawing a line under polymonkey_code. All previous posts and all future posts will live over on the quiet void. In the coming days a redirect will be turned on to move all the traffic over to there.

Always the monkey, MattD

POST EDIT: welcome to the quiet void.